Cloud Computing Integration Services

Cloud infrastructure helps solve all of these challenges by providing an ability to automate most of the tasks and processes using various open-source and vendor-specific SaaS applications. These tools serve a variety of purposes:

• Terraform helps implement the Infrastructure as Code paradigm, where all the settings and variables for provisioning new environments are codified in textual files, so-called manifests. These manifests are stored in your Version Control System and describe any state of any environment you need throughout your software delivery pipeline. They are written in simple descriptive language and can be easily versioned in case your developers need to adjust a couple of parameters.Deploying the required IDE, test environment, build environment, staging environment or a production server is as easy as running a single Terraform manifest. Terraform is supported by all major cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, MS Azure, Digital Ocean, etc, and is provided as an enterprise software platform — Tectonic by HashiCorp.
• Kubernetes is the most popular of SaaS applications used to configure and run clusters of Docker containers. Kubernetes clusters make monitoring and management of heavy workloads much simpler and help dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort needed to launch and efficiently run cloud-based applications.Kubernetes was initially developed by Google and is still provided as a part of Google Cloud Platform, but each of the main cloud vendors — AWS, GCP, MS Azure, DO — is currently providing managed Kubernetes solutions, as well as enables running it as a part of your cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes is the main tool for continuous integration of cloud services, as it has open APIs for adding various third-party software and modules for monitoring, smart alerting, logging, Big Data analytics, etc. Kubernetes will become the backbone of your cloud computing integration process.
• Docker. The main benefit of running your products and software in the cloud is the resource-efficiency. Your applications can run inside Docker containers — lightweight code envelopes that contain all the required runtime routine to launch your applications. These containers use only as many resources as needed for the app operations, and several containers can run atop a single virtual machine. In addition, containers are composed using Docker images — simple container snapshots that are stored in a centralized Registry and can be easily updated after adding new features to your product.Such an approach ensures your software runs wherever Docker is installed, can be launched quickly and updated easily. This provides unparalleled cost-effectiveness and a 300% improvement of resource allocation as compared to using traditional dedicated servers or virtual machines in data centers. Docker is an open-source tool with built-in support for Kubernetes, which is provided by all cloud platforms. Docker is also available as an enterprise-grade software from the initial developer, Docker, Inc.
• Jenkins. Jenkins is an open-source tool for automation of various aspects of software development and infrastructure management operations. The main purpose of Jenkins is working as a glue between third-party system modules to ensure the output of one operation can become the input of the other operation. After Jenkins Workers are configured, the infrastructure becomes semi-autonomous and requires much less effort on ensuring operational resilience and uninterrupted end-user experience.Jenkins is an open-source tool that can be installed on any cloud platform. It has a strong community, a detailed knowledge base and supports cloud service integration with thousands of third-party tools.
• Ansible. Ansible is an open-source configuration management/continuous integration tool. It operates using analogs of manifests — so-called Ansible playbooks. These are written in YAML and allow describing the sequence of changes required to reach the necessary system state. IT is incredibly useful for configuring complex system configurations and ensuring reproducibility of every step.Using Ansible greatly simplifies configuration of geographically distributed systems, automation of environment provisioning and infrastructure management and helps minimize human effort required to ensure resilience and scalability of your cloud operations.
• ELK stack. ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) is a popular cloud monitoring and logging solution that can be integrated with any cloud platform. It enables in-depth analysis of the system operations and provides detailed insights on your mission-critical workflow efficiency, performance bottlenecks and possible room for improvement.ELK stack is modular, and Logstash can be easily replaced with FluentD, another popular open-source log processing tool. The key here is that ELK stack has open API and can integrate with Kubernetes, Jenkins and Docker tools quite easily. This is essential for cost-efficient cloud service integration that will yield great benefits for your business.
• Prometheus & Grafana. Prometheus and Grafana are two open-source tools designed to work together and visualize the performance of your infrastructure. They absorb information like logs, events, messages, notifications, etc. through their APIs and showcase it in an easy-to-consume dashboard. It can be configured quite simply, as you have to only drag-and-drop the metrics you need to monitor into the dashboard.

As you can see, there is a wide range of cloud services that enable continuous integration with your systems. The only challenge here is finding a reliable cloud integration platform to configure the system correctly — or a trustworthy Managed Services Provider to build the solution from scratch.

IT Svit has ample experience with delivering cloud integration services and transforming business workflows through the use of powerful open-source DevOps tools. Should you need our need to achieve your business goals — we are always glad to help!